Moving from a big company to a startup

Get some dirt under your fingernails!

This painting, believe it or not, is NOT called “How I Feel When Children Sing Wheels on the Bus 200000 times” but actually remains “Untitled” (Dwight Mackintosh, 1981)

Going from a career as a big company product manager to working at a startup is like going from a career as a diplomat, playing elaborate strategy games, to a field general trying to survive sniper attacks from all sides. Startup PMs have lots of dirt under their fingernails!

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the most important principles that I’ve seen work for PMs who successfully make the transition. 

1. Ditch the internal theater.

At a big company, the PM role involves internal communication. Your ability to make your ideas legible to a wide group of internal stakeholders and rigorously defend your approach determines your success. 

But at a startup, work only matters if it changes the external outcome – that is, if it helps the company with customers. Startup employees have the default trust of the company to take action. Instead of writing slide decks, make product changes. 

For a big company PM, this can feel like a relief. Startup PMs can show tangible day to day impact, not in some abstract, intangible way that can only be understood through leveling rubrics. At a startup, you’ll be measured on outputs, not inputs. Dashboards > slides! 

2. Launch first, mitigate risks later.

At a big tech company, the PM’s job is to proactively mitigate all of the risks before a product launches. You’re supposed to run around and ferret out every single risk, discussing it with your team ahead of time.

The risk calculation at a startup is different: the biggest risk is that the company won’t survive. As a startup PM, you must focus on this before everything else. Instead of finding and mitigating risks, focus on building what users want. Launch while it still feels very uncomfortable. Your startup earns the right to focus on those subsequent risks with its success. 

3. Focus on product, not Product. 

Startups hiring their first PMs have found an early level of product market fit and are trying to scale user acquisition. The new users have requested a million small improvements to make their experience better. As a startup PM, your job is to make those small improvements happen. 

Instead of the strategy work that big company PMs do, startup PMs should focus on “small p” product and not “Big P Product.” This means that the PM should be in the weeds: dealing with UX details, writing product briefs, and doing whatever needs to be done. 

At a startup, the company strategy is the product strategy and it’s primarily the founder’s job. As a startup PM, start by doing the detailed work and being the “founder’s voice in the room.” Your opportunity to lead strategy will come later. 

4. Tailor, don’t pattern match. 

When Claire Hughes Johnson joined Stripe, she had a 1:1 with every single person in the company. She asked us what was special about Stripe, what its problems were, and then how we thought they might be fixed. While her fixes must have drawn on her Google experience, they were actually very customized to the unique nature of Stripe.

As a startup PM coming from a big company, your past experience is valuable. But your new colleagues will hate to hear, “At BigCo, we did XYZ.” Your suggestions for new practices will be so much more effective if you can tailor them to the challenges of your new company. You’ll gain more credibility by framing your fix as something derived from first principles over trading on the brand name of your past company.

5. You have no job description.

I had a manager who always separated the concepts of “accountability” and “responsibility” – a PM might be accountable for the results of the team, but that doesn’t mean they’re responsible for every task the team does. Startup PMs are excellent at rebalancing their responsibilities in order to deliver on their team’s accountabilities. For example, this could mean giving a core PM responsibility to a capable product engineer in order to pinch-hit on a difficult partner negotiation.

Big Company PMs might be more cautious about stepping on other functions’ toes, or worried about evidencing certain behaviors on the “PM level and ladder” for performance season. In a startup, that’s much less relevant. The ultimate outcome startup employees are shooting for is growing the size of the pie, not quibbling over the particulars of your slice.